Christian Toksvig, the front man for Richard “Dirty Des” Desmond on the U.S. launch of celebrity weekly OK!, said goodbye to the New York staff late Wednesday.

He insists that all is fine here and there is “a long way to go” before the American OK! burns through the $100 million that Desmond has pledged to spend here.

Toksvig, the firm’s North America CEO, told them he’s going home to merry England – which isn’t exactly his home, since Toksvig’s actually from Denmark.

But London is home to Desmond’s Northern + Shell Group, which includes two newspapers, the Daily Express and the Daily Star, and the worldwide headquarters of OK! magazines.

(Desmond picked up the “Dirty Des” moniker because his media fortune was initially derived from porn magazines such as Asian Babes, which he has since sold off.)

“I was posted here for a year to get it started,” said Toksvig.

The American edition of OK! celebrates its one-year anniversary in August.

He said one of the things he’ll be doing back in London is overseeing the development of a new freebie newspaper in London that Desmond hopes will be launched next spring.

For that to work, Desmond must win an auction – one that’s expected to be costly – for the rights to distribute an afternoon freebie in the London transit system.

Toksvig previously worked on the launch of the freebie morning Metro paper in London just before joining Desmond.

Toksvig said he’ll also be “overseeing the international editions of OK! worldwide – including North America.”

There will be no direct replacement as CEO here, he said, but day-to-day operations will be in the hands of Chief Financial Officer Vince Ohanyan.

The magazine launched to much fanfare with a $10 million television ad blitz and trade campaign that poked fun at industry leader People.

But OK!, which was trying to do celebrity friendly stories that most regarded as fluff, stumbled out of the gate with slow newsstand sales and weak ad sales.

But the magazine revamped, added a more tabloid driven cover approach and slashed its newsstand price to $1.99. That seems to have helped.

Toksvig said OK! newsstand sales have actually cracked 500,000 on several issues, although most have not.

Overall, he predicted the magazine will have an average weekly paid circulation of 550,000 for the first half of 2006 – a figure which he said includes about 220,000 paid subscriptions.

By extension, that would mean newsstand sales averaging only 330,000 copies a week. Toksvig says that it has been selling better than that in recent weeks.

Nobody knows exactly how many tens of millions OK! has spent since its rocky start. Toksvig said the investment so far “is definitely over $20 million, but it is in line with our business plan.”

CONDE CAN DO

What crackpot said Joanne Lipman is having trouble staffing her new business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio?

Sources say “Den of Thieves” and “Disney Wars” author James B. Stewart, who writes for Smart Money and The New Yorker, has rebuffed an offer to join. But she has gone about filling the meat and potato positions below the upper tier.

New York Observer media reporter Gabriel Sherman spent the past 3½ years on the salmon-colored weekly and is leaving mere weeks before actor Robert DeNiro takes over.

He is going to join Lipman as a staff writer. “It was a very hard decision, I really love the Observer,” said Sherman.

He said the chance to be part of a start-up “and work with the team they’re putting together is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”

Also throwing in their lot with Lipman: Details articles editor/feature writer Kevin Gray and Wired writer Susan Murcko, who becomes a senior editor.

ZEE LANDS

The Zee man has landed.

Joe Zee seemed to have produced the hotter of the men’s shopping titles when he was editor-in-chief of Vitals at the old Fairchild Publications.

But the magazine seemed to lose out to its troubled sibling rival Cargo, which was being published at the old Condé Nast.

Vitals and its sidekick Vitals for Women were both folded in late October. But it was not enough to spare Cargo, which followed several months later.

Zee, a protege of Fairchild Editorial Director Patrick McCarthy, was spared the ax when most of the Vitals staff was pink-slipped. Zee was spotted chatting with Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, then seemed to fade from the scene.

He’s landed at House & Garden, working for Dominique Browning. “I’ll be producing stories about design, style, fashion and entertainment, trying to bring all those worlds together,” he said.

JOY-FUL

The Village Voice, rudderless for nearly seven months since the New Times took over, has one new appointment.

Joy Press, who used to supervise the Voice Literary Supplement when it was a 10-times a year stand-alone title, has recently moved from literary critic to arts and culture editor.